AU-Aware 3D Face Reconstruction through Personalized AU-Specific Blendshape Learning

Chenyi Kuang, Zijun Cui, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Qiang Ji ;

"3D face reconstruction and facial action unit (AU) detection have emerged as interesting and challenging tasks in recent years, but are rarely performed in tandem. Image-based 3D face reconstruction, which can represent a dense space of facial motions, is typically accomplished by estimating identity, expression, texture, head pose, and illumination separately via pre-constructed 3D morphable models (3DMMs). Recent 3D reconstruction models can recover high-quality geometric facial details like wrinkles and pores, but are still limited in their ability to recover 3D subtle motions caused by the activation of AUs. We present a multi-stage learning framework that recovers AU-interpretable 3D facial details by learning personalized AU-specific blendshapes from images. Our model explicitly learns 3D expression basis by using AU labels and generic AU relationship prior and then constrains the basis coefficients such that they are semantically mapped to each AU. Our AU-aware 3D reconstruction model generates accurate 3D expressions composed by semantically meaningful AU motion components. Furthermore, the output of the model can be directly applied to generate 3D AU occurrence predictions, which have not been fully explored by prior 3D reconstruction models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via qualitative and quantitative evaluations."